Professor Rick Hasen has started an interesting debate on this subject with a recent blog post on Summary Judgments, the Los Angeles Faculty Blog of the Loyola Law School. He believes that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to hear IJ’s and the Goldwater Institute’s challenges to the matching funds provisions of Arizona’s “Clean Elections” law […]

This morning, the U.S. Supreme Court granted cert in IJ’s challenge to Arizona‘s “Clean Elections” system, which attempts to suppress the speech of privately financed candidates and independent groups through the use of “matching funds.” A copy of IJ’s press release is here, and an early news story on the cert grant is here. We’ll […]

As my colleague Paul Sherman notes, we won an important victory for free speech last week when the Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Sampson v. Buescher that Colorado’s disclosure laws for grassroots groups that speak out about ballot issues violated the First Amendment. The case started when our clients, six neighbors […]

In an editorial about a recent Supreme Court argument, the New York Times argues: If the Supreme Court renders justice in a case it heard this month, Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Association, it will strike down a California law barring the sale or rental of violent video games to anyone under 18. That would […]

Now that most of the dust has settled (although in some places it is still plenty dusty), we can assess how well the First Amendment fared in this last election. Probably the biggest news was that Russ Feingold, one of the authors of the largest legislative assaults on the First Amendment since the Alien […]

As Make No Law blog readers know, the Institute for Justice is engaged in a nationwide Citizen Speech Campaign to free grassroots political activists from government-mandated burdens on free speech in the form of campaign finance laws. Yesterday, that campaign scored a major victory. The Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimous ruled (.pdf) […]